How I got fixed as a student

This post follows on from my earlier post on how my formal schooling got nuked, and I now describe how I managed to fix myself as a student.

There were very few jobs available when I left school for those without proper qualifications, especially for a person who did not interview well due to some manifestation of lasting shock from my school experiences. The prospect of being able to get back to where I needed to be educationally looked like an impossible feat. There was no minimum wage back then, and I was extremely nervous of dipping into my precious savings to pay for classes where there was no guarantee that I wasn’t going to get just as much obstructiveness from the lecturer and my colleagues in the class as I got from teachers and students at school.

Well, I had a library membership card, and I made use of it. I was interested in mind development even back then, and so I set about borrowing and reading every book in the psychology, self-development, and mind-body-spirit sections of our local public library.

Perhaps I was just being sensitive about the following because of my own experiences (or lack of them), but has anyone else noticed how so many so-called “inspirational” or self-development books start with the author’s “When I was at University” story?

I found myself being regaled with the story of how Evelyn Wood (of “Reading Dynamics” fame) was at university, and she was reading a book on the beach on a summer break, got annoyed, and threw the book onto the ground. While dusting off the sand from the book, she found her eyes could track the sweeping movement of her hand, and so an idea for a reading technique was germinated.

I found myself reading how Tony Buzan was impressed by a professor at his university who had memorized all the names and personal details of every student in the lecture hall before the start of term.

Later, when I discovered the Barbara Sher and her books for “scanners”, yet again I found myself reading a story about how she didn’t want to have to choose only a few classes at university, because so many of them looked fascinating.

I found myself thinking, “They don’t know how lucky they are to have been able to finish school properly and make it to university.”  And, “How do I get to meet these sort of people when all anyone sees is a high school dropout?”

Well, I might not have a “When I was at University” story to tell, but I not only managed to fix myself as a student, but I learned how to hone my study abilities to the point where I was able to get straight distinctions, if not 100%s, and that is even before I started practising visual mnemonics. I found and enrolled on a study course that offered a structured and disciplined set of techniques to identify and handle study bugs as they came up, and so my quest to become an Olympic athlete of the mind started in earnest in the early 1990s.

I’m not going to pretend that the early part of my road to success was easy, because it wasn’t. The study skills course on which I had enrolled was intended for people who were already on the route to training in a specific technology, and it was full of both technical and organizational terms which I had never encountered before, and it made constant references to a certain type of organization in which I had never worked and had no personal reality.

Added to that, there was the baggage of years of being bullied by kids, underestimated by teachers and futzed with by senior department heads, which would rear its ugly head constantly, to my embarrassment, and I would get hugely upset. I was intimidated by the course supervisor who, I felt, didn’t suffer fools gladly. And my family were alarmed that I was taking classes at an organization that they thought was some bizarre New Age thing.

However, having come this far, there was no way I was going to back down. I kept coming to class, chipping away at the materials, which I could study at my own pace, and I came to learn that the course supervisor Chris actually had a heart of gold and was totally supportive of what I was trying to do.

I noticed my productivity start to soar. My already quite considerable vocabulary (from all that solitary reading) skyrocketed. My confidence increased week on week. I realised that I had been wrong in thinking that I wasn’t that smart, or that there was something wrong with my memory – actually, quite the opposite. I’d just never been challenged in a way that allowed my native abilities to connect up to the driving wheels.

After taking a couple of other courses, I decided I was going to train to be a course supervisor too, and I started helping Chris out in the course room.

Then when the opportunity came up for people to attend an elite training program in the US to train to a very high level in running the courses and learning all the technical skills for debugging any kind of study difficulty that students in the course room might be encountering, my name was at the top of the list.

Here is an article I wrote explaining about this study methodology. (This article was published in IQ Nexus magazine in March 2010.)

I have continued to self-educate and hone my own skills, as well as look into other techniques and technologies for enhancing the study and learning experience for myself and others.